This invention relates generally to data transfer through a network and, more particularly, to the monitoring of data passing through the Internet.
At least some known protocol analyzers and packet capturing programs have been around as long as there have been networks and protocols to monitor. These known tools provide the ability to capture and save network data with a wide range of capabilities.
For example, one such program “tcpdump” available from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (http://ee.lbl.gov/) allows for the capture and storage of TCP packets. These known tools work well for monitoring data at low bandwidth rates, but the performance of these programs is limited because they execute in software. Post processing is required with these tools in order to reconstruct TCP data streams.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide a solution to data monitoring that is implementable at high bandwidth rates.